Frances

It's difficult for me to completely size up a book when the intent of the writer is unknown. I've only read one other book from Mr. Golding (Lord of the Flies, of course) and that was written in an entirely different style from Free Fall, so I couldn't help but be SLIGHTLY suspicious of some pretentious play going on here. Regardless, I am grateful for having a book like this in my collection. For one, it had one of the best opening paragraphs I've ever read. Another is that you end up a different person upon finishing it. The waterfall of curiosity, honesty and passion was rendered with such grace that it is almost unparalleled by any piece of literature I've come across. My copy of this book has been marked with underlines and scribbles and that is how I know that it did its job well. At one point I imagined what I was reading to be an autobiographical account, as it all sounded like unfiltered truth coming from the writer himself. The way the words were thrown in and around and how the conventions of grammar were ignored presented this book as a stream of consciousness that can also serve as a “literary cassette” for the suffering romantic, something to fall back to when you're having one of those days.

The Familiar is a large body of work. With 26 more volumes coming up, I guess it makes sense that the story feels sparse for the most part. That doesn't stop me from nearly ripping my hair out with this first volume, though. I couldn't wrap myself around it the same way House of Leaves did (yeah, I'm one of those who couldn't get over that book).

Sure, the typography that comes up once in a while's fancy, maybe enough to warrant some shelf space if only as a trophy book. The cover art in each chapter was (for me) shrug-worthy. I wouldn't say MZD's got poor taste in design. It's hard to tell if the grungy-pop-eccentric-and-reminds-you-of-your-grandma kind of art was intentional or not. I can't even find a word for it. Bottomline is, it's awkward.


There were still some literary gems scattered throughout that book that kept my faith in MZD as a writer, but I couldn't help it that the only chapters I cared about were those of Xanther's and I just breezed through the rest. That means I owe it a second reading, but I can't promise that. All I know is that I won't be looking forward to the next volume. I might even be exchanging this book for a boxed set of Game of Thrones that my girlfriend has been asking for.

House of Leaves was good enough in itself to keep me as your fan, MZD. The Familiar just didn't win me over. Or hasn't yet. Who knows. At least it's not as painfully unreadable as Only Revolutions. Hence, the 3 stars.

Tristessa - the way it rolls down your tongue like a hiss, escaping like a slow death, is reminiscent of Kerouac's muse from Mexico. A long-time junky, dead eyes, dead love, dancing her way to ruins, untouchable.

One takes from this book the difficult but obvious truth, lessons greater than unrequited love. To fall in love with a junky is to step into a black hole. To live with a junky, one must become a junky. So all throughout this thing we have Jack tiptoeing around and against the void with his bottle of alcohol and notebook of poems, taking us through dizzying streets of men and women in rags, dead animals in ditches, morphine shooters in dark alleys and beloved Tristessa - sick without a shot, sick with goofballs...

It's a sad, painful, brilliant novella. A good entry to Kerouac's works, if one may ask. He is a true jazz writer, making good use of odd notes in language and still have it come out as music. Not many can achieve that. He is to be read in rhythm. In this book, Kerouac writes an ode to lost things, in the process of losing one. La tristesse durera.

A more than sufficient primer for Schopenhauer's school of thought.

I remember picking this up at the university library and I had to take it home with me. Good stuff. Was not able to finish the entire thing though as I had to return it to the library. I haven't found a copy of that book anywhere...

This is the diary of an underground man who attempts to reach out to humanity, from whom he has been detached (intentionally or not, it is hard to determine).

One can easily pass him off as a man gone sour, already out of touch with social conventions, shamelessly declaring his intellectual advantage over the rest of the flock. He describes men of action as stupid, for failing to see the pointlessness of it all. He need not mention his jealousy for their lack of fear. And this is why he must be given a chance.

The book begins with mostly ramblings that go on at great lengths with the occasional digressions (you can imagine how difficult it was for me, not to mention my discovery of the dark side of Mozart and Tchaikovsky out of necessity) but never have I encountered anyone so articulate in exposing the landscape of human nature, including the embarrassing grey areas that you sometimes catch yourself in. It is not all that dark and spiteful, though. He alternates between condescension and self-loathing, pride and humility, misery and comic relief. Towards the end, we catch a glimpse of him making valid points about love, marriage and family.

It is a love-hate relationship that we have with the underground man. He is the spokesperson for all our bitterness, disbelief, helplessness and surrender. This is the curse of a man all too aware, a man who refers to the world outside of his apartment as “real life”.

There was a time in my life when I was always so angry (it could've been at everything or nothing in particular, I just couldn't pinpoint, or maybe admit which); I wish I had read this thing back then. A powerful book, as it is a condensed transcript of all thoughts that should never be known.

Definitely something I will be revisiting.

I like this mostly because it's set in Tokyo, and I guess some props to Murakami for the way it gets under your skin. But the ending got to me again. I can't believe I let him do this to me again. I'll keep figuring out how to like him, book by book, but I know enough now to detach myself from any character in his books.

The book feels like an hour-long drive where occasionally you get flashes of pretty scenery but most of the time it's just soil and dust. I wonder how this book was written. Did his index cards get shuffled? Did he have an impossible deadline to beat? I liked the premise set up for the main character well enough that I tagged along until the last page, but by then the whole thing still felt undercooked. Maybe the only reason I liked the character to begin with was that he seemed like a student of the Tao Te Ching, which I am trying to be.

But hey, it wasn't that bad. It's a quick read, time I could afford to waste. And it did try to redeem itself at some point.

This is what people are talking about when they use words like grace.That moment, that morning, came vividly back to him whenever he thought of it. But soon suspicion set in. He understood well enough that life by very definition is upset, movement, agitation.

—-


“Think we choose our lives?”“No. But I don't think they're thrust upon us, either. What it feels like to me is, they're forever seeping up under our feet.”

So you start out with a bunch of despicable characters who couldn't possibly have any stories worth telling as their lives are seemingly empty except when they happen to have some wine. Steinbeck proves us wrong. How many times have you seen a homeless drunkard sitting by the road staring at nothing and felt sorry for the guy? Steinbeck teaches us that there is no need to be, because that man is staring at the world in its entirety, and that man has more time than you'll ever have to tell the stories of the world.

It is difficult to stop reading this book no matter how painful it is at times, but it ended well and I wouldn't have preferred any other ending. I would say this is one of Steinbeck's best.

I like his mind, I like his style. He treads in the surreal and thumps out words in the rhythm of jazz, or chaos.

I like most of the poems in this collection.

Seems like a lot of people hate the author for some scandal I have never heard about and didn't bother to know about. Others are simply unimpressed with his writing style.

I, on the other hand, loved it. It was one of those books that shifted my focus and stayed with me like a bone graft.

I borrowed it from a friend when I was a senior in high school, right at the start of the most hysterical string of years in my life. I learned various forms of escapism and my state of mind matched that of the main character in the book. An ambiguous addiction, the pulverization of the self, the discovery of the Tao. The free structure of his prose matched that of my own scribblings on little journals from those years. The characters became my friends, so much so that I had to find a copy of My Friend Leonard online.

I started reading this 9 years ago, couldn't finish, and then again a couple of years ago - it was the much earlier edition. Though I enjoyed it as I would any Hemingway book, I was not as drawn to it as I did in the third reading. Back then I had no connection to the places and the locales he often uses as points of reference to characters and the silent developments in his inner world. This would explain why I trudged through it. I did not get to finish the book when typhoon Rai destroyed my home and most of my books.

Fast forward to last winter when I visited Paris and bought the restored edition from the Shakespeare and Company. It was a laidback trip and had no company so I had the freedom to walk around mostly in the 5th arr. I didn't realize until later that this area was Hemingway's turf and I had meandered through most of the streets he wrote about. I did not read the book until after I left Paris.

With this new element my second time reading the book hit different, almost intimate, and I think it's because of the impression the city (along with my personal affections) had on me during and after. I finished the book in two sprints. 60% of it in one afternoon.


It was a good thing i got to reread this as the restored edition - the main text was how Hemingway had prepared it for publishing. The chapters are organized differently and some post-humous revisions rolled back. It also has additional sketches/chapters and “fragments” after the main text, that are alternate versions/drafts of some sections found from his manuscript. A bulk of the chapter on Hadley and Pauline which was previously omitted were very powerful in that the reader has access to the his most vulnerable state in that “winter of murder”. All of this provide a better understanding of the author's perspective and process, and a glimpse into the fragility of the mind of the great writer who by that time was already marked for death.

Interesting to read one of his earlier works. It reads different. I did not like the breaks where he addresses the reader. Offensive to a culture but then again one can say he a victim of his time. Also unrelated- but I am absolutely torn by the brutal fate he gave the character Diana. She did not need any more than what she already suffered.

I see how feminists would come to hate this book, and it is only because they overlooked the signature: that the book provides so much honesty in the dialogue while being a step away from reality. Yes, Catherine Barkley may have sounded so shallow; however, Frederic Henry was also presented above the machismo standard, as emphasized by his lack of feelings for the baby.

Another juxtaposition that stood out to me was of war and childbirth – both of heavily varying nature but bringing along with them the same kind of grief, suffering and death.

And as always, I am captured by the style of writing by Hemingway, which is a mix of heavily descriptive prose and blunt poetry. So many lines that brought me goosebumps.

I cried at the end.

Quite a handful of gems in this anthology